The present invention relates to a method for designing a custom integrated circuit or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).
Modern electronic appliances and industrial products rely on electronic devices such as standard and custom integrated circuits (ICs). An IC designed and manufactured for specific purposes is called an ASIC. The number of functions, which translates to transistors, included in each of those ICs has been rapidly growing year after year due to advances in semiconductor technology. Reflecting such trends, methods of designing ICs have been changing. In the past, an IC used to be designed as a mere combination of a number of general-purpose ICs. Recently, however, the designer needs to create his or her original IC such that the IC can perform any function as required. In general, unit costs and sizes are decreasing while design functionality is increasing.
Normally the chip design process begins when algorithm designers specify all the functionality that the chip must perform. This is usually done in a language like C or Matlab. Then it takes a team of chip specialists, tools engineers, verification engineers and firmware engineers many man-years to map the algorithm to a hardware chip and associated firmware. This is a very expensive process and also fraught with lot of risks.
Today's designs are increasingly complex, requiring superior functionality combined with constant reductions in size, cost and power. Power consumption, signal interactions, advancing complexity, and worsening parasitics all contribute to more complicated chip design methodology. Design trends point to even higher levels of integration, with transistor counts exceeding millions of transistors for digital designs. With current technology, advanced simulation tools and the ability to reuse data are falling behind such complex designs.
Developing cutting-edge custom IC designs has introduced several issues that need to be resolved. Higher processing speeds have introduced conditions into the analog domain that were formerly purely digital in nature, such as multiple clock regions, increasingly complex clock multiplication and synchronization techniques, noise control, and high-speed I/O. Impediments occur in the design and verification cycle because design complexity continues to increase while designers have less time to bring their products to market, resulting in reduced amortization for design costs. Another effect of increased design complexity is the additional number of production turns that may be needed to achieve a successful design. Yet another issue is the availability of skilled workers. The rapid growth in ASIC circuit design has coincided with a shortage of skilled IC engineers.